Camera Men by Luc Sante
Hyfler/Rosner
The Lives They Lived.
December 26, 2004
RICHARD AVEDON, B. 1923
HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON, B. 1908
HELMUT NEWTON, B. 1920
Camera Men
By LUC SANTE
Someday it may seem unbelievable that Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton coincided historically:
three major photographers, each highly influential, each
with a style as distinct as a fingerprint. As unalike as
three photographers could be, they nevertheless all worked
for magazines, overlapping in the public eye for at least a
couple of decades; thus they unintentionally collaborated to
enlarge the public sense of what photography could do. If
they had not also coincided with so many other great
photographers, they might have constituted a golden age all
by themselves.
Cartier-Bresson, born in 1908 in France and trained as a
painter, started taking pictures almost by happenstance --
he bought a secondhand camera while traveling in Africa in
1931. Newton, born Helmut Neust* dter in Berlin in 1920, and
Avedon, born in 1923 in New York City, both decided on
photographic careers when they were adolescents. All three,
then, started taking pictures during the 1930's, the decade
that photographic images first truly saturated the world --
it was the decade of Life and its many European predecessors
and counterparts. Periodicals began using photos to tell a
story rather than as mere illustrative adjuncts to text. At
the same time, and perhaps paradoxically, it became widely
accepted that photographs were not bound to the literal
truth, that they could be just as subjective and
indeterminate as works in any other visual medium.
Cartier-Bresson was, sequentially, a master of both
tendencies. The pictures he took in his brief but awesomely
fecund first period of work -- a mere two years and
change -- are all about finding dream elements in waking
life. A man in the marketplace in Barcelona sleeps sitting
up, his mouth agape, while over his head a graffito of a
face, with its open mouth, stares goggle-eyed at some unseen
horror. A boy wobbles in a kind of mystical ecstasy, his
eyes rolled back, in front of a peeling wall that looks like
an action painting 20 years early; the boy is in fact
searching the sky for the ball he tossed up. These pictures
and their fellows -- most of them impossible to describe in
a sentence -- are the greatest realizations of Surrealism in
photography, although Cartier-Bresson was never a member of
the Surrealist gang.
Decades later, Helmut Newton found another way to photograph
dreams. Newton, who fled Germany in the late 30's -- he was
Jewish -- and settled in Australia, labored diligently in
the vineyards of fashion photography for decades before
getting art-world recognition. Somewhere along the way he
found inspiration in the Surrealist gallery: Man Ray's
coldly erotic photographs, the paintings by Paul Delvaux of
lush somnambulistic women fixed like moonlit mannequins in
empty cities at night, the disturbing tableaux that Hans
Bellmer confected using doll parts. Newton absorbed this
imagery and transformed it into fashion layouts, featuring
tall, cruel women posed insolently, often with lethal props,
often in and around 18th-century chateaux. You could imagine
his models, creations of a jet-set Marquis de Sade, engaging
in Socratic dialogues before they repaired to the boudoir to
humiliate a banker or two. His pictures were often very
funny, if you could pay the psychic admission fee to their
world, which meant knowing how to short-circuit the
differences between cold and hot, master and servant,
splendor and misery.
Cartier-Bresson, meanwhile, could not rest on his dreams,
not in the violent, unrelenting climate of the 1930's. He
tried movies for a while (he made a couple of documentaries
and worked in various capacities on some of Jean Renoir's
greatest films) and then resolved the tension between the
impulse to make pictures and the wish to remain engaged in
the world by becoming a photojournalist. His career in
reportage was cut in two by the war -- he was captured by
the Germans, escaped on the third try, joined the resistance
and was reported dead in 1944. He may be the only artist
ever to help hang his own posthumous show, planned by the
Modern on word of his demise and finally opened in 1946. The
following year, he helped found the Magnum agency, a
cooperative that quickly became an institution.
In this country he has been saddled for 50 years with the
catch phrase adopted as the English title of his first major
book, ''The Decisive Moment.'' (The original French title
translates more modestly and aptly as ''Pictures on the
Run.'') The consequent legend features Cartier-Bresson as
the intrepid, clairvoyant photojournalist, always magically
on hand to capture the million-dollar image. But although he
did score an unplanned scoop -- in 1948 he met and
photographed Gandhi 15 minutes before Gandhi was
assassinated -- he never sought the headline shot,
preferring instead the subjective, psychologically resonant
impression. One of his most famous pictures encapsulates the
fall of the Kuomintang in China in 1949 by showing a run on
a bank: it is simply a line of people of all sorts, crushed
together as if by unseen clamps, wild-eyed with panic.
Like Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon (who, like Newton,
devoted his early career to fashion) found in midlife
another way to interpret the documentary mission of
photography. As a fashion photographer, this son of a Fifth
Avenue dress-shop owner excelled at courtly elegance,
delicate and exacting and not without its erotic wild
side -- think of Dovima and her elephants. As a
documentarist, he looked long and hard at people who were
often neither beautiful nor elegant, and he soon became
famous for his employment of the plain white backdrop, which
eliminated any distractions from the study of what John Ford
called ''the most interesting thing in the world: the human
face.''
In conjunction with his 8-by-10 view camera and his
insistence on uniform lighting, the white backdrop decreed
an astringent vision of democracy -- not Norman Rockwell's
but that of the mug-shot camera at the police precinct or of
the recording angel on Judgment Day. All humans were
candidates for his impartial lens: movie stars, writers,
artists, the Warhol Factory personnel, the Chicago Seven,
the Ford administration, various drifters, ranchers and
oil-field workers and his own father, dying of cancer. If it
weren't for the clothes, you might mistake a wildcatter for
a duke, or an ingenue for a chicken plucker. The drama lay
somewhere in their eyes.
All three lives -- Cartier-Bresson's, Newton's, Avedon's --
followed unexpected trajectories, with significant detours,
geographic and otherwise. Cartier-Bresson, after reinventing
himself several times over, stopped taking pictures
altogether in 1974 and devoted the remainder of his years to
drawing, like a monk giving himself over to meditation.
Newton, who changed his name once and his continent of
residence several times, appeared to be a semifictional
character, his flesh-and-blood existence indistinguishable
from the ironies of his pictures. Avedon trafficked in
confection and then in the absence of confection, the two
apparently opposing halves finally resolving to make him the
greatest portraitist of his time. In combination, the three
demonstrated that the camera is less an extension of the eye
than of the subconscious mind, with all of its riches and
all of its snares. They showed that photographic truth is
never literal, is often tangled up with artifice and always
speaks to the emotions before addressing the intellect.
Luc Sante is the author of ''Low Life'' and ''The Factory of
Facts.'' He teaches at Bard College.